


Thorns

by qwanderer



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angels can sense emotions, Botanical Metaphors, Gabriel is an ass, Other, Pining, another take on why Aziraphale didn't know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:13:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25318117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwanderer/pseuds/qwanderer
Summary: “Expect demons to lie with their emotions,” Gabriel told Aziraphale when he was briefing him for the Eden mission. “To the Fallen, emotions are weapons. Don’t let them be used against you.”
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 179





	Thorns

Like all angels, Aziraphale could sense emotions. And he liked to think he was rather good at it. He could tell when Gabriel was focused and when he was distracted. He could tell when Uriel was in a good mood and when it was really best to steer clear.

But he couldn’t sense Crowley’s emotions.

To some extent, this was to be expected. Lucifer had pioneered the concept of hiding one’s emotions, of furling them in so tightly that they couldn’t be sensed by others. He taught it to his followers, and they used it to their advantage in the War. 

Apparently, they’d kept at it in Hell, always trying to get one over on each other and take advantage where they could.

“Expect demons to lie with their emotions,” Gabriel told Aziraphale when he was briefing him for the Eden mission. “To the Fallen, emotions are weapons. Don’t let them be used against you.”

Aziraphale nodded, as if he understood what that meant. He knew better than to ask questions of those Above. 

𝀸

Aziraphale didn’t know what to think of the serpent. 

Obviously, he was up to something. He was a demon! He’d gotten the humans kicked out of Paradise! So Aziraphale kept on his guard for any attempts to manipulate him through emotion.

The thing was.

Aziraphale had had several conversations with the serpent thus far, and as hard as Aziraphale tried, he couldn’t sense any emotions coming off the demon at all. He wasn’t projecting. He was totally closed off.

You couldn't be lying if you weren't  _ saying _ anything.

This was frustrating.

𝀸

It was maybe 500 years after Eden, when they’d had quite a few of these little conversations, that Aziraphale finally broke down and asked, “Do you  _ ever _ let your emotions free?”

“Not generally,” said the demon. “Not a good idea, Downstairs.” The corner of his mouth quirked. “Is  _ that _ what you’re always so curious about?”

“Perhaps,” Aziraphale admitted. “To some extent.” He had been curious about a great many things in his life, but to deny that this question had been eating at him above all else during his conversations with the Serpent would have been a lie.

“Well,” said the Serpent, “as long as it’s  _ you _ asking.” 

And then something in the stealthy, demonic soul cracked open, and Aziraphale felt the sweetest, most devoted love he’d perceived in quite some time. 

The angel’s eyes widened, and he stared at Crawly in wonder. 

The love turned, if possible, even more fond. If it had had a color, it went from a deep, lovely pink to something with a warm bloom of soft orange.

Abruptly, Aziraphale remembered himself, and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, this has to be a trick.”

The love disappeared in a blink, like a lamp going out. Replaced with Crawly’s usual tight-furled nothing.

“Well,” said the demon in a flatter-than-usual tone, “be careful what you wish for, I suppose.” He stood, dusted off his black robes, and wandered off. 

𝀸

Aziraphale spent years and years mulling that over. It didn’t make sense. 

The word from Above was that demons were incapable of love. And Aziraphale could tell they genuinely believed that. No one had ever felt real love from a demon. 

No one except, perhaps, Aziraphale.

No, it couldn’t be simply what it appeared to be. He was a demon. He had to have some ulterior motive. It had to be something the demon had let him feel on purpose, in order to gain something. 

Demons couldn’t be capable of anything that pure and lovely.

But they had to have feelings, didn't they? They weren't just machines. They were former angels. And emotions could be folded away, to various degrees, but not created out of whole cloth, as it were.

There were certainly angels who could do subtlety. Michael, for example, projected an emotional state that felt like nothing so much as an origami flower, tightly folded in some places and calculatedly open in others. Nothing was hidden entirely, but things were obscured, de-emphasized, kept quiet.

The fact that Crawly’s default state was to project nothing, and that he’d only opened up when asked, meant something. 

Aziraphale simply had no blessed idea what that meaning was.

𝀸

Over the next few millennia, Aziraphale paid close attention both to the evident state of Crawly’s emotions, and to the facial expressions he couldn’t hide the same way. 

Sometimes, when Aziraphale pushed for a response, Crawly would give him just a burst of irritation, or anger, or even caustic humor. It was like reaching for a lovely flower he remembered being there, and getting pricked by a thorn. 

But it was never vicious. 

As the Ark was being loaded, Crawly was particularly prickly. The serpent pushed back at everything, radiating little bursts of disbelief and rage as Aziraphale told him what was to happen. 

The twist of outrage that came with the words “You can’t kill kids!” hit particularly hard, and nearly weakened Aziraphale’s resolve to follow his orders from Above. 

The thing was, Aziraphale was almost certain that wasn’t why Crawly had let him feel it. 

𝀸

Crowley was nearly a hedgehog, in Rome, he was so prickly. Aziraphale had half a mind to tell him that when he asked if Aziraphale had been expecting an aardvark. But the angel decided that wasn’t very likely to improve his mood, and decided to simply steer clear of the whole issue. 

Whenever Crowley read totally blank, he had the happiest expressions, fond expressions or content ones, and Aziraphale came to take that blankness as a good sign. He couldn’t depend on the expressions anymore, now that Crowley had started wearing those damned dark glasses, but at least it wasn’t the only sign. 

𝀸

It was only after Aziraphale opened his London bookshop that he noticed the association between Crowley being particularly prickly, and the weather being cold. 

It was 1962 by the time it really registered properly.

They were walking side by side down a perfectly lovely snowy Oxford Street, Aziraphale enchanted by the holiday displays in the shop windows and the lights strung up above them, and Crowley trying to pretend he didn’t care about anything.

“This is boring,” Crowley said. “Tired of London. Can't we go to Agadir and get sloshed instead? I could go for a good Moroccan grey right now.”

“Nonsense,” Aziraphale replied. “You enjoy the holiday decorations as much as I do, I’m quite aware. When you let yourself.”

Crowley’s reply came with a sharp burst of irritation. “A few lights are all well and good,” he said. “The snow? The snow can burn down in Head Office.” He snorted. “Makes it all a bit twee, doesn’t it?”

Aziraphale looked at Crowley closely, trying to read him, figure out what was really going on. 

“Oh, stop looking at me like that,” Crowley said, wrinkling his nose. “I’m fine, it’s fine, you want to talk while we look at the shop windows, that's what we do.”

This time the prick of irritation came with undertones of resignation and discomfort. It clearly wasn’t actually fine. Aziraphale didn’t know why, but if it was genuinely bothering Crowley, they could do something else.

“I could do with a drink of something warm,” Aziraphale mused. “Some cocoa, perhaps? There’s a shop just around the corner…”

“Well, lead the way!” Crowley said with a fond smirk, and nothing at all escaping his aura. 

Even when Aziraphale spent the next hour and a half oohing and ahhing over a display of intricate gingerbread houses in the bakery around the corner. 

It was only when the door swung open to admit another group of customers, and the breeze blew in, that there was another faint spike of annoyance from the demon. 

And Aziraphale understood.

𝀸

A few years later, when Aziraphale appeared in Crowley’s car to stop him from going through with a ridiculously overcomplicated heist just to get a hold of some holy water, the demon was spiky as ever. Until Aziraphale put the thermos into Crowley’s hands, and the demon realized what was in it. Then, in the middle of a flare of annoyance, Crowley’s emotions snapped shut so fast it almost made Aziraphale dizzy.

Considering what the contents could do to Crowley, that terrible blankness frightened Aziraphale more than any emotion could have done.

𝀸

As the Apocalypse approached, Aziraphale grew used to sensing nothing from Crowley again. Nanny Ashtoreth was always buttoned up, and she was always very careful not to let her irritable nature loose around Warlock.

Aziraphale wasn’t sure how much of it was the character of Ashtoreth and how much of it was just Crowley feeling more of the things she felt she needed to hide and less of the things she let out to push others away.

Aziraphale (or rather, Brother Francis) took to prodding her to see if he could get her to emote. He mostly failed. 

And then it turned out they had the wrong boy, and they needed to go to Tadfield to find the right one. There were dozens of people shooting each other with  _ paint balls, _ and Crowley did something which seemed, on the surface of it, to be an absolutely evil and cruel thing to do, but then, he showed his kindness anyway.

Aziraphale said something about him being nice, deep down, and. Well.

“I'm not nice,” the demon growled, and the spike of emotion dwarfed most of the others Aziraphale had felt, almost as intense as the Flood. It was a chaos of anger and frustration and terror, none of it really directed at Aziraphale. 

Of course, no one could know Crowley was soft. That would be the worst thing, for a demon. He hid the sweet feelings, guarded them the most tightly of anything. And he was terrified when someone managed to read them off him anyway.

Aziraphale didn’t cower when Crowley pushed him against the wall, didn’t even flinch. But he also didn’t bring it up again.

𝀸

When they talked about how to manage the switch, Crowley told him that as long as he was afraid, the other demons would be quite happy to believe that he was Crowley, and after he pulled off surviving the execution, everyone would be much more worried about what he could do than how he was feeling. Even so, Aziraphale practiced being spiky (which he wasn't), and angry (which he was), and smug (which he fervently hoped to be). 

When Aziraphale asked Crowley if he thought he could pretend to be Aziraphale with the angels in front of him, Crowley said, "Leave that to me, angel," and wouldn't talk about it again. 

When they met in the park, Crowley was radiating a low-level wariness, and a general fondness that fluctuated from moment to moment as his eyes (or rather, Aziraphale's eyes) flitted around to look at the world. Hiding other emotions by means of distraction and preoccupation. And. Well. That was how Aziraphale did it, wasn't it? Not closing off, but sidestepping the issue. Crowley had been watching him as closely as he'd been watching Crowley.

Crowley was going to do just fine in heaven.

𝀸

A few things were different, after the Apocalypse didn’t. 

Most things were the same, between the two of them, but there was simply more of it. More meals together, more drunken conversations, more steady looks half-hidden by dark glasses.

Aziraphale had gotten used to the glasses. He’d gotten used to the spikiness. Those were just how Crowley  _ was. _

But gradually, ever so slowly, Crowley let his bursts of emotion last longer. Long enough for Aziraphale to catch subtleties of them he hadn't before. The protective edge to his frustration when Aziraphale got himself into a pickle. The way he didn't really mind when Aziraphale got caught up in a book and forgot an appointment, as long as the angel was willing to talk to him about whatever had caught his fancy.

𝀸

It was a crisp November afternoon, and the sky was the most incredible blue they ever got in London. Aziraphale had insisted on walking to and from lunch, rather than taking the Bentley. 

He got rather distracted as they walked back to the bookshop, looking up at the clouds, listening to a bird who had burst into song on a nearby linden tree.

“If I’d known you wanted to be serenaded I’d have done it myself,” Crowley said with a snap of annoyance.

Guiltily, Aziraphale turned to him, recognizing the beginning of one of the prickly rants Crowley went on when Aziraphale kept him out in the cold too long. 

Crowley opened his mouth to continue, as Aziraphale expected. But this time Crowley stopped himself. “Sorry,” he said instead. “Just a bit cold, is all.”

The folded container in which Crowley held his emotions was slow to snap shut around the spike of irritation, and behind it, Aziraphale could feel just a glow of… something. 

Something he wasn’t sure if he wanted to name. But he knew it was precious, and he knew he wanted to feel more of it. Just to be sure of what it was.

“Of course, dear,” Aziraphale said, wrapping an arm around Crowley. “Let’s get you back inside and have something hot to drink - perhaps an Irish coffee?”

Crowley smiled, eyebrows going up. “Wouldn’t have thought that was your thing,” he said. 

“Well, I won’t know unless I try, will I?” Aziraphale answered. “Besides, I’ve just had a magnificent lunch and most of two desserts and a lovely walk on a brisk autumn day. I think it might be about time we did something that might be more _ your _ sort of thing than mine.”

Crowley didn’t argue with that. 

They spent the evening in the bookshop with the promised Irish coffees, which Aziraphale ended up putting rather more sugar in than the recipe called for, when it came to his own, but he did enjoy the result. He sat on one end of the sofa while Crowley sprawled over the remainder, which was a thing they’d been doing more in the last month or so. Aziraphale enjoyed the closer proximity.

Crowley settled in under a couple of throws and sipped his spiked coffee with a satisfied hum. 

Aziraphale considered him for a moment, how he absolutely flourished when given a little consideration and kindness, and determined to do more of it.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said to Crowley, “that as much as I’ve enjoyed living in London, perhaps, now that we are free of our duties, we might relocate somewhere to the south.”

Crowley removed his sunglasses in order to blink at Aziraphale. “Are you saying you want to move, just because I admitted I was a bit chilly?” he asked incredulously.

“It may have been a factor,” Aziraphale said.

“Won’t mention it again, then,” Crowley murmured. “Couldn’t take you away from England. You’d miss it too much.”

“Oh, well,” said Aziraphale. “I don’t know that I’d want to - not  _ permanently, _ you understand, although I’d certainly love to join you on holiday. To anywhere you’d like. But I had thought - more along the lines of the South Downs. Perhaps the Isle of Wight.”

“Of course,” Crowley said, shaking his head fondly. “You know, it’s not much warmer there than here. Cities make heat, you know.”

“True,” said Aziraphale, pursing his lips. “Never mind that for now, then. What do you think of wintering in Luxor?”

“Stubborn,” Crowley accused him. “Is this more of your ‘Irish coffee’ nonsense or do you really want to go somewhere? Because I’m happy wherever you are.”

Aziraphale got stuck for a moment on the question of whether Crowley had meant ‘I’m happy wherever you are  _ happy’ _ or ‘I’m happy wherever you are  _ present’ _ before deciding it didn’t matter, and he replied, “I’m happy wherever you are, too. But I’m getting used to the idea that I’m free to do as I like, and I have found myself drawn to the idea of traveling because it’s fun, and not because I’ve been ordered somewhere.” He smiled at his companion. “If your preferences inspire me to look at warmer places, well, it doesn’t make those choices any less  _ my choice.” _

Crowley looked at him in silence for a moment. “Okay,” he agreed softly. 

Aziraphale nodded. “Right. So. Luxor?”

“Luxor is awfully tourist-y these days,” Crowley pointed out. 

“So is London,” countered Aziraphale. “It’s clearly not a deterrent for either of us.”

“S’pose not,” Crowley agreed, and the conversation turned to planning how they’d spend their holiday in Egypt.

Hours later, the sky was dark outside the shop windows and the bottle of Irish whiskey had migrated from the bench by the hob to the floor by the sofa in the back room, and was now significantly emptier. Crowley was waxing lyrical about the way the stars looked from the middle of the Egyptian desert, and Aziraphale was listening raptly.

Crowley squirmed and flopped, and then he was lying on his back with his head in Aziraphale's lap. He didn't seem to notice, still talking without interruption about the milky way. It took a moment for Aziraphale to notice, too, but when he did, he was just drunk enough to think that running his fingers through Crowley's lovely red hair was a marvelous idea, without remembering all the reasons why he might hesitate to do so. 

It was soft, with just the slightest crispness of some sort of hair product, and when he ran his fingers across Crowley's scalp, the demon fell silent, closing his eyes. 

"Hum," Crowley murmured, "'snice."

Aziraphale hummed in agreement, and continued to run his fingers through the brilliant, fiery strands.

Crowley wriggled a bit, settling himself on the sofa, and then relaxed against Aziraphale, head going heavy on the angel's leg. As Aziraphale continued stroking his hair, Crowley's breathing deepened and slowed.

Aziraphale could tell the moment when he fell asleep, without a doubt, because that was the moment when a wave of love spilled everywhere.

Soft, blooming organically, like a rose. 

The demon was utterly unconscious, incapable of hiding or dissembling. Terribly vulnerable. And absolutely radiating love. Pure and sweet, just as he remembered it from millennia ago. But stronger now, more vibrant and complex. 

And the trust. It took Aziraphale's breath away.

"Oh, love," he breathed, and abruptly noticed that he was crying.

Crowley must know, by this point, that he was loved in turn. Mustn't he? Aziraphale had noticed that love in himself in the forties, and once he'd noticed that he felt an emotion, he was dreadful at hiding it. He tried to think about how clever and frustrating the demon was every time Crowley came up in conversation with Gabriel, in order to cover the affection, but wasn't sure how well he succeeded.

Although judging by Crowley's imitation of Aziraphale's skittering, distracted mind, he might have been doing better at it than he thought

"Oh dear," he muttered to himself, sniffing. He watched Crowley's sleeping face, stroking a careful finger down his cheek and willing him to know how much he was loved.

Crowley's face scrunched a bit, and then he blinked up at Aziraphale. "Whassamatter?" he slurred, reaching up to brush his fingers across the tear tracks on Aziraphale's face. As he woke, his emotions muted slightly, but Aziraphale could still feel so much from him.

"I just," said Aziraphale, and then he took a shaky breath. "I'm sorry for how terribly I misjudged you, all those ages ago. And I hope you know that I have come to feel the same."

"Oh, angel," said Crowley. He twisted around until his face was mushed against Aziraphale's belly, and wrapped his arms around the angel's waist. "You were only ever good at hiding it when you knew people were watching."

Aziraphale laughed messily. "Good," he told Crowley. He stroked Crowley's hair again, nails scrabbling softly through the short hair at his neck. He sighed lightly. "Were you ever going to tell me it was real?" he asked. 

Crowley shrugged, and said, "I got used to you not believing me." He was quiet for a moment before continuing, "After the end times and all that, things felt different. And. Well. I was working up to it." He grimaced. "Kind of managed. Meant to do it with words, though. And preferably while I was awake."

"I loved finding out this way," Aziraphale told him. "I didn't have a moment's doubt. And it was so beautiful to have you here without any of your defenses up. So open and soft."

"Nngh," Crowley said, burying his face in the fabric of Aziraphale's waistcoat. "Don't get used to it." But he didn't mean it at all. His emotions vacillated a little as he struggled to keep being open. "Sorry for all those things I pushed at you instead," he mumbled. 

"Oh, love," said Aziraphale. "You don't have to be sorry for that. You were - we were both - defending ourselves. Against the world, against the way we were pitted against each other." Aziraphale leaned down and kissed his forehead. "You're like a wild rose. Worth all the thorns."

Crowley hummed contentedly, squeezing Aziraphale a bit tighter. "You too, angel. Like brambles." He closed his eyes, apparently deciding that having no defenses was easier when he was asleep, and therefore he'd better get back to it. 

Aziraphale thought about brambles. With berries sweet and tart at once, full and lush. Slightly wild. Growing on every piece of earth they could. Overflowing with fruit, but guarding it fiercely with many sharp little thorns.

It did rather remind him of himself, on Earth, going native bit by bit, learning everything he could and storing that knowledge away in his shop. 

And then there was Crowley, who convinced the first humans that the fruit of knowledge was worth all the risk.

Yes, they were quite the pair, Aziraphale thought. 

And he basked in the warmth of Crowley's love, not moving a muscle all the way through until morning.


End file.
